Abstract:
Master Zhuang’s “heart fast” and “sitting forgetting” are moral attainments but not aesthetic observations, for neither Kant’s aesthetics nor Husserl’s phenomenology can demonstrate the aesthetic character of the two practices. Zhuang’s aesthetics is not a type of aesthetics in the sense of beauty appreciation, but one in the sense of moral spirit. “Great beauty”,“extreme beauty”,“heavenly music” and the like he affirmed and the beauty of those physical things that express the former are not aesthetic beauty but moral and spiritual beauty. It follows that Zhuang is antiaesthetic in emotional experience, artistic creation and discrimination of beauty from ugliness. On the other hand, however, his ideas such as “heart fast”,“sitting forgetting” and the like were converted into aesthetic categories and aesthetic issues since the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and formed a style of aesthetics characteristic of Taoism.
